University of Southern California
California
1880
To honor California’s famed natural resource, in the 1880s University of Southern California students selected gold as their official school color. The College of Liberal Arts within the university soon began using cardinal as a complementary color, so in 1896 USC President George W. White combined the two, adding cardinal to the gold to give USC two university colors instead of one.
Citations in the World Almanac (listed by cover date; color information is from the previous year): gold (1904); cardinal/gold (1906-1908); gold (1909-1914); gold/cardinal (1915-1916); gold (1917-1931); cardinal/gold (1934-1935)
Although it may have been assigned earlier, the academic hood lining design for the University of Southern California was first cited in a 1918 Encyclopedia Americana article on academic costume written by Gardner Cotrell Leonard, the Director of the Intercollegiate Bureau of Academic Costume (IBAC). Leonard stated that the university had been assigned a hood lining that was a single color of “gold yellow”.
The IBAC must have felt that this bright gold hood lining too closely resembled the dandelion yellow hood lining of the University of Rochester, so by 1927 the IBAC had added a cardinal chevron to Southern California’s “gold” hood lining. Unfortunately, this design too closely resembles the hood lining the IBAC had earlier assigned to Coe College (gold with a crimson chevron).
The IBAC did not modify Southern California’s new hood lining design (gold with cardinal chevron) after that point.
To avoid confusion with the hood lining originally assigned to Coe College, here the IBAC’s original single-color hood lining pattern for the University of Southern California has been restored.